Cafe Muse Oct 4: Idra Novey & Luis Alberto Ambroggio

Poets Idra Novey and Luis Alberto Ambroggio

read from their work and sign books

When:  Monday, October 4, 2010, 7:00 p.m.

Where: the Cafe Muse Literary Series

at the Friendship Heights Village Center

4433 South Park Avenue

Chevy Chase, MD 20815

More information at WordWorksBooks.org

IDRA NOVEY is the author of The Next Country, winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award (Alice James Books 2009) and translator of Paulo Henriques Britto’s The Clean Shirt of It (BOA Editions 2007) which won a PEN Translation Fund Award. Her poems have appeared in Slate, The Paris Review, A Public Space and numerous other publications. She teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and serves as Deputy Director for Columbia’s Center for Literary Translation.

LUIS ALBERTO AMBROGGIO is the author of eleven collections of poetry.  His poetry and essays have appeared in Linden Lane Magazine, Passport, Scholastic, International Poetry Review, and Hispanic Culture Review), and anthologies (DC Poets Against the War, Cool Salsa). Cross-Cultural Communications of New York has published his bilingual anthology Difficult Beauty, Selected Poems (1987-2006) His poetry has been recorded in the Archives of Hispanic Literature of the Library of Congress and has been translated into several languages.

Santiago, Chile 2005 



Here, where a ruin longs


to be a house, and a house

to be left to ruin.

Where men blindfolded students

and pushed them down

the basement stairs.  



The house almost tips


with its history, with a wish


to be simply walls  



and pillars and patio—


so we could walk by, arms


loose but linked, and speak  



of window trim.

--- Idra Novey, excerpt “Pausing Outside a House” from The Next Country 



Why do I write?

To crucify myself, then to be reborn as innocent, moist soil,

to be the last and the first,

to stop the river now, hold it in my hand and drink water,

so when others sip the drops they’ll know there is a river,

because my teeth chatter from the cold, from stone and fury

and because the shadows of my days and nights will lose all hieroglyphics,

--- Luis Alberto Ambroggio, excerpt “The Witness Bears his Soul” from Difficult Beauty